InterContinental Ambassador planning changes this year

An InterContinental presentation mistakenly placed online shows that the company is planning changes to its Ambassador loyalty scheme for 2016.

Before I come to those, I want to summarise how Ambassador works for those who are not familiar with it.

InterContinental, the luxury hotel brand inside IHG Rewards Club (which also covers Holiday Inn, Crowne Plaza and others) is a little odd when it comes to loyalty schemes:

As part of the Holiday Inn / Crowne Plaza group, it participates in IHG Rewards Club

InterContinental does not officially recognise your IHG Rewards Club status. In reality, they often do, but it is not guaranteed.

InterContinental also has its own loyalty scheme – Ambassador – which costs $200 to join

And yet, despite the $200 fee ($150 to renew), I consider Ambassador a good deal and have been a member for a number of years.

The key thing about Ambassador is that, once you are a member, the benefits are GUARANTEED on paid stays. They are NOT guaranteed on reward stays, but most properties do let you have them. These benefits are:

A certificate for a free weekend night when you join and each year when you renew. In one swoop, you can save your entire membership fee with this benefit. To use the voucher, you need to book a 2-night weekend stay and pay the Best Flexible Rate for the other night.

The letter of the rules says that only standard rooms can be booked. However, many hotels let you book club rooms or suites. I have a Junior Suite booked at InterContinental Le Grand Paris on my 2016 voucher next month.

GUARANTEED one-level room upgrade – this is usually processed before you arrive and is visible online

A voucher for 5,000 IHG Rewards Club points when you join and each year on renewal

4pm check-out – this is a guaranteed benefit and comes in very handy on a weekend break with an evening flight back home

A free pay-TV movie per stay, every stay

Free fruit and mineral water in your room

A welcome gift – varies from chocolates or wine to weird local souvenirs!

Double occupancy for single occupancy rate – useful in Germany, one of the few countries where they still charge a ‘second person’ supplement

Obviously InterContinental Ambassador is not for everyone. You can earn back the cost of membership in just one weekend stay, though. It may even be worth it if you had just one long stay booked and wanted to guarantee your upgrade. Ambassador members also receive Gold status in IHG Rewards Club although that doesn’t get you far.

Renewal is even cheaper, at just $150, and you receive another ‘free weekend night’ certificate and another 5,000 IHG Rewards Club points.

Courtesy of Loyalty Lobby, a PowerPoint presentation from an internal IHG conference had been mistakenly placed on a publicly accessible website. IHG has now removed it.

It is a conference presentation on how the Ambassador scheme will evolve. It makes very interesting reading, some of which surprised me. IHG has even calculated the global profitability of the scheme.

You won’t be surprised to learn that Ambassador does drive more stays – once you’ve joined, you will spend more nights at InterContinental hotels. IHG has run ‘before’ and ‘after’ numbers to prove it.

What interested me is that the dynamic is not as I expected. Individual hotels encourage their regular guests to sign up for Ambassador at the front desk – a fairly easy ‘sell’ because of the benefits. Those people do increase their visits to other InterContinental hotels but not hugely. People like me, who spread their IC business across lots of different properties, are in the minority. The majority of members are signed up by a particular hotel and receive the bulk of their benefits from that hotel.

How do Ambassador members feel? A rough summary is that Ambassador members no longer feel ‘special’ at the hotels and are annoyed with the inconsistent delivery of benefits.

I personally find the second point odd because it is the ‘guaranteed’ nature of the benefits which attracts me. It is possible that hotels which go ‘above and beyond’ for Ambassador members are causing problems for those hotels which stick to the guidelines and no more – the problem is that putting a foot down here would lead to a de facto devaluation.

The only proposed changes so far appear to be:

In-room fruit being switched to a choice of fruit, sweet or savoury snack

Clearer signalling of the upgrade path, in particular regarding upgrades to the Club Lounge

There are bigger changes coming for the invitation-only Royal Ambassador tier. This is likely to gain a revenue target based purely on InterContinental spend. At present you can achieve it by spending 40 nights in a Holiday Inn Express and then 20 nights across three separate InterContinental hotels which is not what IHG had planned.

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They have always given me ambassador benefits even with points stays and third party bookings. Of course they don’t need to, but in my experience they do. One way to reduce the risk might be to sandwich a paid night in the middle of some points stays: at the very least they are likely to leave you in the upgraded room for the entire stay.

For me, ambassador has been fantastic and made me hugely loyal to the brand. In just under a year I’ve spent 25 nights at IC hotels, and a good few at other IHG properties in preference to other chains as I value the loyalty programme.

Agreed, I am in what appears to be a minority of HFPers who consider paying for IC a waste of money, so only redeem there, am trying to use up all my points 50K at a time instead of 10-15K on HIExs, but IHG keeps giving me more and more!

Having taken out the IHG barclaycard before bonuses stopped counting for status, I paid £99 and received 60000 points which took me to Spire, and got matched Hilton Diamond and (recently) Club Carlson Gold….

Rather than tinkering about at the edges it would have been better to firstly sort out the complete dog’s dinner they’ve made of their Spire Ambassador renewal packs for almost a year now. Despite several requests for an update over the past 9 months or so, they still seem to be nowhere near resolving the issue. The latest email I received last week stated:

“We would like to inform you that all order for Spire Ambassador portfolios are currently on hold since the “Spire Member Guides and Boxes” are currently not available. Rest assured that your Spire Ambassador portfolio will be sent once member guides and boxes becomes available.”

Prior to that there has been an ongoing issue with their vendor?? Whatever that means!

In September it will be renewal time again and I very much doubt if I’ll have received the pack for the current year. So, no Weekend Night Certificate and no 5K points back. I would hope that they will either refund the cost of the last renewal, or offer the next year free.

Has anyone received a Spire Ambassador renewal pack and card? Are you still waiting?

It took my about 5 months to get mine but it finally came along, however, the 5k point voucher was not in it. The free night certificate is good through May of next year as well. There are some people on FT who say that they have had success getting the Ambassador team work it out with the hotel directly to allow them to use the free night without actually having the certificate. Obviously, that will very much depend on the hotel.

If you didn’t get the points voucher, just email the ambassador program and they will add them to your account. My points were there the next day.

AMB team contacted IC BKK for me and IC BKK confirmed via email that the physical presence of the AMB night certificate was waived in this instance. Customer Services was all fine save for the issue of the pack itself.

IHG should give a better training course to its staff. It depends on the person who reads and responds to the mails, some copy standard phrases, others are completely out of subject…I had to send six mails in order to finally get my renewal pack after having been waiting for several months.

I really rate the Ambassador status and definitely made it worthwhile last year at the Paris Le Grand – they were able to give Club access instead of an upgrade from our Eiffel Tower view room with balcony which was actually much better for us.

One thing I dont understand – where/when do/can you see the room upgrade online beforehand? I have upcoming bookings in about 6 weeks at the IC Frankfurt and Madrid and the room on the booking is just the one that I have paid for. Any ideas?

I’ve always wondered this too because some hotels do it right away and others don’t. I’m RA and have two upcoming booksings, the further out one they already show my upgrade but the one that is this weekend (at the London O2 IC) is still showing the room that I booked.

Ambassador is *ok*, but the IHG program itself is so poorly run that it’s barely worthwhile participating . The only reason I bother is to access a few good airport HIXs and a handful of ICs.
But : hopeless app, totally inadequate directions/maps ( does anyone from IHG ever look at it from a consumer’s perspective?), Weird promotions, well-meaning but inept phone support staff ( probably poorly trained), inconsistent status benefits. A very marginal program.

Following on from your recent review of the IC at the O2 I am planning a weekend stay for our anniversary in August on a weekend with no local events for the cheaper cash rooms. My question fits nicely with this article, I was thinking about ambassador status, should I either pay or use points to get it now ahead of my visit, or hold out to buy on arrival? Will getting it on arrival bring any benefits? I’m currently only IHG gold having just missed the plat renewal target 🙁 if that has any bearing.

Our booking of 2 standard rooms domeside was upgraded to a riversise suite and connecting deluxe but they have been because those were the only connecting pair available. In this case it probably doesn’t justify paying for it just for this one stay – you might be better off paying for club access and trying to get a riverside uograde thrown in.

I think the real benefit of ambassador was really the 4pm checkout. Yes, the upgrades are guaranteed but I seemed to be getting very similar rooms whether I paid £140 or £250. In my personal experience, the ambassador voucher requires a much higher room rate than usual as well.

I would have put my foot down on 1) and not accepted it, because it isn’t an upgrade. I got stuffed like this in Abu Dhabi recently and only the fact I checked in at some stupid hour of the night meant I let it go – I was also on a ‘breakfast included’ rate anyway so the benefits from the lounge would have been marginal. I got 15,000 points as compensation at check-out when I complained about that and some other issues.

I stayed again at the Intercontinental O2 this weekend and mentioned that in my previous stay I wasn’t given a proper upgrade. The lady said that it did count as an upgrade because:

1. The room is physically the same size but the furniture is arrange in a way to make it more spacious. (I almost laughed out loud)

2. The bathroom amenities are better in the King Club IC room. I checked this and from my three stays I can find no difference.

3. The King Club IC room has a direct view of Canary Wharf whilst the Deluxe Canary Wharf View room has only a side view. I can’t vouch for this because they moved me from a Canary Wharf view room to a Riverview room for both stay number 2&3.

A point to note, the 20% off mastercard rate does not show that breakfast is included within their system. I had to spend 10 minutes at the front desk to prove that I was entitled to breakfast by emailing to them the evidence.

Overall, for £140, I think it was fantastic value for money to stay in London and I wouldn’t hesitate to stay again!

I think the biggest bugbear with AMB is the mythical upgrades that suddenly seem to appear – i.e. Being upgraded to rooms which aren’t available to book online. This is the silly practices that need to be sorted out. Other than that and the length of time it has taken to sort out the packs being delivered I haven’t had any major issues with AMB although I don’t spend a huge number of nights in ICs.

I would much prefer they sorted out Spire first however. The “Exciting changes” they mentioned that were coming this year have not materialised thus far and we are almost halfway through the year. As regularly seems to be the case with IHG they can talk the talk but struggle to get up out of the chair let alone walk the walk.

Re the proposed RA changes. Well this really will sort out the men from the boys. If they keep the same 1% ruling but apply it to revenue rather than nights/stays there could be some very disappointed people out there given how low the average rates can be at some ICs compared to Park Lane, Le Grand, Amstel etc. I know of at least one RA who floats around Europe stay at ICs such as Berlin, Warsaw, Madrid etc and requakifies for RA each year with an average paid room rate of £125 per night.

Long time since I had Royal Ambassador status (or even plain old Ambassador) but I always found the benefits consistently delivered (including very memorable stays at the IC Hong Kong and the Amstel). Now, I have a stay at a holiday Inn coming up, and I’m lowly old Blue…. Does Ambassador still come with automatic gold (thinking it will be worth it for the bonus points, given the intended length of the stay)?

This is the reason why they haven’t sent any Ambassador packs in the past few months. I hit Spire in February/March and renewed Ambassador at roughly the same time and didn’t receive the card, voucher etc. Emailed them recently as I was about to book a weekend stay and they offered to send me the voucher via UPS. They also promised to send the whole pack as soon as they decide what should be in it. Overall, very good customer service.

Still haven’t received my pack, renewal was in February, I gather from the responses above that it is because I am Spire and they don’t have packs for this level which is ridiculous…
I am spire until December 2017, let’s see what happens until then…

OT but IHG related – I am looking for 3 nights in LA at the end of our Rte 66 trip next year and Kimpton Hotels are appearing on the list of options but not for reward availability – when you click through it says Kimpton are not yet part of IHG Rewards Club – are they due to join any time soon?

It’s ‘free’, but you have to pay an inflated rate for the Ambassador Weekend Night that goes with it, ie you can’t book the best available rate to go with the ambassador ‘free’ night but have to book it using a special code ( so while it’s still relatively cheap in that you get 2 nights, th second night is not really “free” as one would normally define it.

Quite right. To be honest I get much better value from my ambassador status staying at crowne plazas. Get breakfast for free and been upgraded to very nice rooms. The free night ambassador weekend rate can be very expensive compared to the advance purchase rate. It depends on how flexible you are and whether you may cancel. The guaranteed upgrade varies across Inter Continentals. Some wil give you a room with a better view as an upgrade whilst others will give you a suite. Staying as an ambassador when booking on points is a lottery and any updrade are at the whim of the check in desk.

I live in Cumbria and have a 1 night freebie with IHG from my Barclaycard which will expire mid-August. No trips to London planned which counts out the 2 Intercontinental’s there, so which hotels between Birmingham and Edinburgh (i.e. a 3 hour driving radius) would people pick as a good redemption?

I’ve never been able to get on board with Ambassador due to the fact that it does not give you automatic access to the Club Lounge. This is the one reason why I have not signed up to it, as I know I can walk into any Conrad or Sofitel and get the lounge access. I mean it doesn’t even get you breakfast of any sort, which is an absolute joke.

An absolute joke? Not really. It’s a status you can buy for less than the price of one night at a Conrad, and that status Chinese with a free night certificate. I would say that the net cost of ambassador is no more than 20 quid, and for me it is less than zero. Of course it doesn’t come with lounge access and breakfast.

I don’t really find the benefits very consistent, I’d say about half my stays get no upgrade. They admittedly I don’t then start pushing it at the front desk, but I feel awkward doing this, which is why I like the idea of guaranteed upgrades where you shouldn’t have to haggle. At the last IC I stayed in too, they couldn’t check me in on time which they blamed on another Ambassador having late checkout – takes away much of that guaranteed benefit if it means they can’t check you in on time either! Having (thanks to HfP) matched to Hilton Diamond, I find the Hilton benefits of free breakfast and lounge access are much more consistently provided. I get that Ambassador can be bought, but being Spire Ambassador (which in theory is much harder to get) doesn’t carry much weight when RA exists.